frances harlow

As part of WGBH’s station-wide 30 Issues in 30 Days coverage, Richard Kahlenberg, author and senior fellow at The Century Foundation, presented Boston Public Radio host Callie Crossley with his case for why the Civil Rights Act should be amended to better protect would-be labor organizers.

With the editorial direction of lead producer Chelsea Merz, I successfully pitched the initial story, prepared background reading for Crossley, and wrote the segment’s lede in addition to scheduling the necessary ISDN with Argot Studios in New York City.

In his 30th season as managing director of the Huntington Theatre Company, Michael Maso joined Morning Edition host Bob Oakes to reflect on the company’s decades-long relationship with the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson and the completion of his ten-play “Century Cycle.”

As fill-in field producer for WBUR’s Morning Edition, I helped prepare questions for Oakes and assisted George Hicks with recording. I also photographed Maso on location in his office at the Huntington Theatre Company and edited the raw interview from nearly an hour to just over eight minutes using Adobe Audition.

Trans-species psychologist Dr. Gay Bradshaw explained to Here & Now host Robin Young how sustained elephant slaughter in Cameroon has traumatized the surviving half of Bouba N’Djida wildlife reserve’s African elephant population and compared the effects this violence to genocide among humans. 

With the guidance of Here & Now’s Senior Producer Kathleen McKenna, I acted as the show’s liaison with Dr. Bradshaw, drafted questions for Young based on my pre-interview, and edited the audio for broadcast in Adobe Audition. The finished segment was enormously popular, garnering a total of 628 Facebook shares and 85 tweets. 

“Seawater in Their Veins” unflinchingly portrays the effects lives spent at sea have on the families of one of Maine’s last functional fishing villages, Port Clyde. While Glen Libby, president of the Port Clyde fishermen’s cooperative, describes the pride of passing on his grandfather’s legacy by teaching his sons to fish, Mel Cushman and her friend Kim Libby articulate the challenges of waiting for their husbands to come back ashore.

Narration written and voiced by Sara Franklin. Photography by EP Li. “Seawater in Their Veins” was produced during the fall 2011 semester at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies for the Doc in a Day project, in which participants had 24 hours to gather the raw materials for their audio slideshows, and featured on Down East magazine’s website.

“Capes & Corsets” profiles two young women with remarkably similar yet seemingly incompatible reactions to the male dominance that defines virtually every aspect of the comic book industry. Bevin Lucas is a student printmaker at the Maine College of Art and outspoken feminist adorned with tattoos of Batman and the Green Lantern. Nicole Jean is a cosplayer; she sews her own meticulously accurate, and thus revealing, costumes and models them at events like Maine Comic-Con. Despite their differences, both Bevin and Nicole respond to comics creatively, engaging with the familiar iconography while using their bodies — the physical manifestation of their alienation — to convey their devotion. The juxtaposition of their distinctly feminine modes of fandom reflects broader debates about sexism, women’s agency, and what it means to be empowered.

Photograph of Nicole Jean dressed as Emma Frost by Wolfgang Daniel. “Capes & Corsets” was produced during the fall 2011 semester at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies with instructor Michael May’s editorial direction. To date, it has aired on NHPR, WRST, WRVO, and Public Radio Remix. If you would like to license “Capes & Corsets” for your station or program, please visit my PRX user page.

Through the observations of 24-year-old University of Southern Maine student and activist Jake Lowry, “Governing the Occupation” focuses on the radical nature of consensus governance set against the backdrop of emerging class tension in Occupy Maine’s encampment. As with many such encampments, there has been a schism between the more intellectually engaged supporters, for whom the tent city is a metaphor representing the importance of consensus, and the full-time occupiers — often homeless or unemployed — who are less invested in consensus as an ideological apparatus and consider the General Assembly to be just another bureaucracy. Spanning several weeks of Jake’s tireless involvement with Occupy Maine, “Governing the Occupation” demonstrates how the social movement’s success is ultimately contingent upon the factions’ capacity to address and reconcile their differences.

Photograph of the Occupy Maine encampment in Portland’s Lincoln Park by Katrina Herzog. “Governing the Occupation” was produced during the fall 2011 semester at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies with instructor Michael May’s editorial direction. To date, it has aired on the Global Voices podcast, KFAI, and Public Radio Remix. If you would like to license “Governing the Occupation” for your station or program, thank you for your interest and please visit my PRX user page.

“The Regular Crowd” is a one of the 12 site-specific MP3s that compose Speaking of Wickenden, a cell phone-based audio tour produced in conjunction with the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage in Providence, Rhode Island. The tour was constructed by shaping clips from more than 30 archival interviews into coherent narratives, with each stop highlighting a different aspect of the historically Portuguese and Cape Verdean Fox Point neighborhood. “The Regular Crowd” is a humorous yet poignant reminiscence depicting the social importance of bars for men and, eventually, women.

After a team of graduate students selected their favorite clips, I performed the entirety of the audio editing for the project, a task rendered more difficult due to the relatively poor sound quality of the original recordings that were never intended for broadcast. For more information about Speaking of Wickenden, including an accompanying audio slideshow and explanatory brochure, visit the Fox Point Community History Project. Download the full audio tour from iTunes U.